Open Letter, August 20, 2005

Thursday I got the urge to do some experimental cooking. I’m no student of the culinary arts, but looking back at the results of this particular project, I think I have a gift.

I wanted to make molé (moh-lay) sauce. There’s a restaurant in downtown Salt Lake called The Blue Iguana that serves several different molé sauces, and on my current budget my hankering cannot be sated with a trip out to dinner. A few months back I went to the local mexi-mart and bought a bottle of something claiming to be molé sauce. It looked like someone had gotten sick in a jar of molasses, and it tasted awful. Chemical analyses later showed that something in the La Brea Tar Pits was, in fact, pregnant.

So I turned to my good friend in the culinary research field, Monsieur du Google, and dug up four molé recipes, each quite different. Apparently there’s more to the word “molé” than “sauce made of ground beans.”

Here’s where I begin to think I may possess a gift for this kind of work. I laid out all four recipes, and made a master list of their ingredients. I then substituted things that I figured would probably work in place of things we didn’t have (no almonds in the house, but we have walnuts and pistachio kernels, for instance). I then started gathering ingredients, and throwing them in the blender. I was just eyeballing it, but I could TASTE what was happening without putting things in my mouth. These flavors that I needed to blend together were familiar enough to me already that my brain engaged on some primal, channeling-the-tongues-of-the-ancients level, and I became a blending dervish.

My goal was to end up with two to four cups of experimental sauce. In tweaking the flavors, though, I kept having to add water to get things to blend, and by the time I was done I had a GALLON of pseudo-Mayan pureé bubbling away on the stove. I say tweaking — the flavor of the walnuts was wrong because the walnuts I used were NOT last year’s harvest from our tree out back. They were a harvest from Chalain’s inlaws back in 1998, and they’d gone bitter. Working THAT taste into something nummy took quite a bit of dilution, the addition of some sweetness and a bit of vinegar, and possibly the distant smile of Qetzlcoatl.

Sandra came home just in time for it to be done. She tasted a spoonful and declared it “pretty good.” Then she looked at how MUCH “pretty good” there was, and declared it “I think we need to make a dip out of this for the potluck this coming Saturday.”

So I poured it into some it’s-not-real-Tupperware boxes, and put it into the refrigerator to steep.

Friday morning I folded a tortilla around some grilled pork, poured a good half cup of Howard’s Holy Molé on it, grated some cheddar on top, and then cooked it authentic Mexican Restaurant Style — in the microwave (Note the wording: this is authentic to the style of local Mexican Restaurants, not authentic to the style of actual Mexicans, nor any other Central Americans of culinary distinction).

By the iridium of Chixculub, it was GOOOD. Three ‘o’s of good, at least.

You want the ingredients? Okay: In no particular order… onions, celery, canned pinto beans, home-bottled tomatoes and green chiles, crumbs from the bottom of a big bag of corn chips, olive oil, cheap balsamic vinegar, sugar, splenda, almost a cup of Hershey’s baking cocoa, pistachios, I-wish-I-had-picked-better-walnuts, raisins, garlic powder, basil, cumin, chili powder, and probably a quart of water.

I know, I know. You’re looking at that list and thinking “that’s NASTY.” That’s fine. More for me, pal.

Latter-Day Saints (you know, the Mormons) have a commandment to not partake of “harmful drugs.”

This gets interpreted variously, but for the most part it means “don’t take anything illegal, don’t take recreational drugs, and be careful with prescription stuff.” Mormons in Amsterdam, for instance, aren’t allowed to smoke marijuana, even though it’s legal there.

Intellectually, I understand this commandment. Chemicals that alter your consciousness can block your ability to cope with the “real world” around you, and cloud your ability to listen to the Holy Spirit. A drug that makes you feel happy and peaceful may prevent you from taking appropriate action in times of trouble.

That’s my “intellectual” understanding, and until now it’s all I’ve had. I’ve never been drunk, high, or had any sort of “trip” with the help of stuff that I swallowed, snorted, smoked, or injected, so there was no practical understanding.

Until now.

This evening I took two Lortab. They were the first two I’d taken in 48 hours. Shortly after taking them I felt really, REALLY mellow and happy. The massive workload I’m staring at here in front of my computer couldn’t shake me from this blissful, peaceful sense of “it’ll all work out.” I’ve had that feeling before when I’ve prayed for help with a problem, but at those times I had to work for it, and the feeling came with a bit of edification. In THIS case, however, I’m just happy for no reason.

I like this feeling. I see the attraction of being able to pop a couple of pills to be happy. I was grumpy, irritable, and in pain prior to dropping a 15mg dose of hydrocodone, and now I feel like most of us probably wish we could feel most of the time: HAPPY.

The bottle of Lortab is almost empty. I’m smart enough to know that the feeling I’m enjoying is drug-induced, and the thought that I won’t be able to do this anymore makes me scared. But the scared feeling can’t quite cut through the happy feeling.

So… I’m happy, and mellow, and smiling like a fool while the little Howard in the back of my brain worries about where we’re going to get the emotional cash to pay the piper when the prescription runs out. The doctor might be willing to refill it if my shoulder is still giving me grief, but Sandra will not let me ask him to. Smart lady. Smart, and acting on the express instructions I gave her a month ago.

–Howard

I don’t know what happened, but I was wiped out today.

I woke up at 8:30, and felt like crap. I had breakfast, took a hot shower to loosen up the mess of knots I had in my back and shoulder (which still complains about our little separation incident 5 weeks ago), and then went back to bed at 9:30. At 11:30 I woke up and was exhausted. I puttered at the computer, and then went back to bed at around noon. At 1:30 I got up and felt pretty good. I got an hour’s worth of work done, and then felt wiped out, and ready for another nap.

I made it to the Temple for this evening’s shift, but ran out of steam around 8:00pm, just four hours in. And do note, please, that the four hours I was there were spent propped up on ibuprofen and around 25mg of caffeine. “Propped” up, not “hopped” up, thank-you-very-much.

I have three theories:

1) I’m getting sick. My temperature is 98.2, so it’s a possibility.
2) Not taking narcotics at bedtime (I tried to do without on Tuesday night) threw me for a loop.
3) Accrued interest on my sleep debt reached the point at which the First Metabolitionist Bank of Howard foreclosed on my Wednesday.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better. I’m on drugs again now, and am starting to feel the sleepy-loopy pull of them, as they summon me to the fluffy one-sided softness of sleeping always on my left side. I miss being able to see my bedside clock. (I’d call it an “alarm” clock, but that implies use of the “alarm” feature, and you can bet your summertime jammies I don’t use THAT these days.)

–Howard

p.s. I got email from a couple of schlockers. Terry sent me Tommy Shaw’s “Girls With Guns” track, and totally made my day. That song is punchier and happier than I remember it being, which is unusual. Most “memory lane” tracks have a lot of suck in them when I listen these days. The other email was from Jeff, who pointed me at Overclocked Remix. I now have a remix of “Lemmings” playing in the background… if this ain’t fitting music to draw comics to, I don’t know what is. But there’s some heavy-hitting “DOOM” remixes waiting for a chance to inspire me…

The Stake Auditor and I met this evening to go over the 9th Ward’s financial books. It’s a semi-annual audit, which means I can look forward to another one in February.

Anyway, we did the books, and it was pretty dull. No big discrepancies, a few minor points of “you’re not doing this right,” and a couple of items that our Bishop needs to review. The worst part: it took just over 150 minutes. The best part: the auditor was pretty impressed with how meticulous I was in my record-keeping. Oh, and the bits where there were discrepancies were bits that happened BEFORE I came on board. So far they have nothing they can pin on me.

There was this small matter of $50 in cash that went AWOL during the first donation batch in April. In preparation for the audit, I spent an hour reviewing donation envelopes last Sunday trying to figure out what happened. The bank counted the cash we sent them, and said we were $50 short compared to what we said we’d deposited. Naturally, I had to go through all of that batch’s reciepts (LDS donations have little receipts that go with them, and we save every one of ’em). This evening I told the auditor about the process, showed him my notes, and explained why I couldn’t find the money. According to the receipts, we collected what we told the bank we were depositing. Therefore, we either 1) miscounted the same stack of cash in the same way during two separate countings ($50 over, with one or more cash donations being under what the reciepts said) , 2) somebody stole $50 after we counted but before we filled the deposit bag, or 3) Bank Error.

I’m really glad that particular batch wasn’t MY batch. I didn’t come on board until June. Occam’s razor says “explanation 2.” But I found one cash donation receipt that could have had several $50 bills in it, and that ended in *80. That could have been transposed into *30 pretty easily with careless counting (and it would have to happen three times — once by the donor, once by the clerk, and once by the guy re-counting), and with THAT explanation in hand, I still trust the guys who did that batch.

I just don’t trust ’em to count MY money.

So… the auditor liked my work, and I don’t stand accused of perfidy, nor do I have to accuse anyone else of it. And I’m going to ride roughshod over ANYBODY who tries to mess with my system of stapling some of these little pieces of paper to other little pieces of paper, now that I know how important they are during an audit. If I have to become a petty bureaucrat, I plan to be an EFFICIENT one.

–Howard